Spectator Life

My grandparents’ home was a proper house, on the cusp of Hampstead Heath in North London, with roses and flagstones at the front. It was the sort that looked like it housed a robust wine collection – solid on account of good, aged European bottles, bought at a time when standards were, one assumes, higher.  There was one bottle in my grandfather’s possession that came with particular fanfare: a 1974 Bordeaux whose label was so far gone you couldn’t see exactly what it was. As a treat, I arranged to have the sommelier of the Connaught Hotel examine and open it. Once the cork gave way, a thud of brown sediment rocked the bottle. It was decanted and it breathed – inasmuch as a long-dead thing can breathe. Still hopeful, we tried the sherry-looking stuff – and it was nasty.

What does Monte Carlo conjure up? A glamorous casino where fortunes can be won and lost, but mostly lost? Men in evening dress at baccarat tables with beautiful women standing by? A tax haven for the glitzy rich on the Cote d’Azur? Fabulous Belle Epoque buildings? A refuge for Edwardian English invalids to escape the cold? Grace Kelly? The Grand Prix?  It was here that Max de Winter met the girl who became the second Mrs de Winter at the beginning of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. "What do you think of Monte Carlo, or don't  you think of it at all?" he asked her. "I said something  obvious and idiotic about the place being  artificial," she recalled.  Well, she was pretty much correct.

In the early 1970s, celebrity chef Jacques Pépin and his wife bought a dilapidated house in the Catskills so they could go skiing on the weekends. It was a real fixer-upper. Groups of friends would come up from New York City and pitch in on the renovation effort, and Pépin would serve dinner at the end of the day. These weekends were so much fun Pépin decided to memorialize them by hand-lettering and painting special menus. How Pépin convinced his friends to let him sit in the kitchen sketching petits poissons and heads of broccoli while they slaved away at framing and drywalling his winter getaway is, admittedly, mysterious.

There’s something wickedly entertaining in reading about other people’s kitchen debacles, whether actual or fictional. They’re just so relatable. The jelly that won’t jell in Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives is cruelly hilarious, but the best culinary catastrophe in classic fiction, for my money, is in Anne of Green Gables. Stylish guests, including the upper-crust Mrs. Chester Ross, are dining at Green Gables and our ebullient Anne is on her very best behavior. All goes well until Marilla arrives with the pudding and a pitcher of pudding sauce. On spotting the pudding sauce, our heroine’s eyes grow wide and terrified.

Smart Italian restaurants in cultural destinations are like buses: you wait ages for one and suddenly two come along at once. I recently praised Locatelli at London’s National Gallery. Returning to the city, it is the turn of Cicoria at the Royal Ballet and Opera, Covent Garden; a joint under the aegis of Angela Hartnett, well-known for her upscale restaurant Murano in Mayfair, her casual chain Cafe Murano and her frequent appearances on the box. Surprisingly few of the world’s great opera houses have given much thought to catering, although things are improving. I ate very well recently at Madrid’s Teatro Real and you can push the boat out with caviar at the Met in New York.

The New York Times recently released its annual list of America’s Top 50 restaurants – and the perfectly predictable honorees highlight just how beholden the restaurant industry is to the tastes of a would-be cosmopolitan class. The casually refined, vaguely ethnic-fusion cuisine that you stumble upon even in America’s most provincial places is rife. From New York to Los Angeles and everywhere in between, America’s restaurant industry has never been more diverse. Yet somewhat counterintuitively, it’s also never offered more of the same. Often, these restaurants propose some mix of French staples (think mother sauces, patisserie) or Italian comfort food (pasta, pizza) fused with Latin, Asian and/or Middle Eastern flavors.

On what is controversially called Columbus Day weekend, which this year fell uncontroversially at the end of Sukkot, my wife, daughter and I found ourselves in our native habitat: New York. Naturally, this meant a trip to Zabar’s, though because our daughter is a toddler who travels by stroller when she is not toddling, I decided to make this Saturday different from all other Saturdays: “to” Zabar’s meant this time “up to but, alas, not inside.” After all, weekends are always a madhouse in the country’s most famous “appetizing” store, founded in 1934, but especially so four days after patriarch Saul Zabar’s death on October 7 (of all days) at the age of 97. An awful lot of pilgrims journeyed last week to the mecca of this self-described “lox-smith.

There’s a famously untranslatable expression in Virgil’s Aeneid: lacrimae rerum. Latin scholars, always fond of threshing things out, have devoted reams of analysis to proving just how untranslatable it is. As is typical of academics, however, they go to lots of trouble to establish its utter untranslatability – and then turn around and translate it anyway. When pumpkins aren’t being cozy, they generally denote a sense of emptiness or artifice Word for word, lacrimae rerum means “The tears of things” (or, depending on your school of thought, “The tears for things.”) But each scholar has his slant on the sadness.

Eleven Madison Park, perhaps the finest of New York’s fine-dining establishments, is adding select meat dishes back to its prix fixe menu after an ill-fated foray into veganism after the pandemic. Chef Daniel Humm announced the move in the New York Times, citing all the predictable reasons for ditching a plant-based menu. First and foremost: the finances. “It’s hard to get 30 people for a corporate dinner to come to a plant-based restaurant,” Humm told the Times, noting the negative feedback from diners over the years. Still, he framed the move in moral terms, explaining how he didn’t “realize that [the vegan menu] would exclude people.” To this, I can only muster an eye roll.